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December 10, 2009

EPA Must Be Stopped

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it.

The EPA's finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant explains why the administration wasn't too concerned over possible failure at Copenhagen. This was their Plan B.

The finding is an environmental Sword of Damocles held over the head of the U.S. with a warning that if cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer is not signed into law, the full regulatory fury of an unelected bureaucracy will be unleashed on the American people and the U.S. economy.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has announced it will sue to overturn the endangerment finding on the grounds that the EPA has ignored major scientific issues, including those raised in the Climate-gate fraud scandal.

"EPA is clinging for dear life to the notion that the global climate models are holding up," said Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel. "In reality, those models are about to sink under the growing weight of evidence that they are fabrications."

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true," Inhofe said.

Dr. Alan Carlin — an EPA senior research analyst at the National Center for Environmental Economics who dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his environmental toadies at the EPA were wearing no clothes — agrees that the EPA finding is based on the data manipulation of the CRU.

CRU data have become an integral part of the EPA's attempts to regulate emissions, Carlin wrote on his Web site Dec. 2.

The EPA plans to blunt opposition by "tailoring" the Clean Air Act for greenhouse-gas emissions, only covering big emitters that churn out at least 25,000 tons of gases a year.

But this may bring legal challenges from environmentalists who want everything regulated as well as from big businesses complaining of unequal treatment, since the Clean Air Act requires it to cover facilities emitting as little as 250 tons.

Coming after a "jobs summit," this is a job killer of unprecedented magnitude that will doom any economic recovery, and is based on made-up facts rooted in false assumptions. It must not be allowed to stand, either in the courts or the Congress.